Krauthammer Then and Now

At least one reader of my last post, in thanking me for drawing her attention to Charles Krauthammer’s characterization of Obama’s joint-session speech (“the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president”), assumes that Charles is as fervent a supporter of the President as she is. Alas, this is not exactly the case, though one wouldn’t necessarily know it from the portions I quoted. There are a couple of subtle hints, e.g., the faintly mocking coinage of “Obamaism” and the line “He has said so openly”—as if seeing a crisis as an opportunity were somehow evidence of shameless rascality. But these are nuances only a trained Krauthammerologist would notice. In fact, Charles is a hero of the right, which has showered him with love and honors, including the A.E.I.’s Irving Kristol Award and the Bradley Foundation’s first Bradley Award (250 big ones). His main outlets, besides his syndicated Washington Post column, are the Weekly Standard and Fox News. His social circle consists of the commanding heights of conservative politics and thinktankdom. ‘Twas not always thus. In 1978, when I first met Charles, he had recently left the practice of psychiatry and was in the process of landing a speechwriting job with then-Vice-President Walter Mondale. Charles’s political views back then? I’d estimate them at 70 per cent Mondale liberal, 30 per cent “Scoop Jackson Democrat,” i.e., hard-line on Israel and relations with the Soviet Union. During the nineteen eighties, Charles and I were colleagues at the New Republic. By halfway through the decade, he was 50-50: still fairly liberal on economic and social questions but a full-bore foreign-policy neoconservative. Since foreign policy was all he really cared about, he might as well have been 70-30. We argued a lot. The whole staff argued a lot. The quality of the arguments was fairly high. I have to say this for working for TNR: it was intellectually bracing. Nowadays, as best as I can make out, Charles is a pretty solid 90-10 Republican. He continues to believe in science, including evolution, but after twenty-plus years of conservative cosseting he seems to have made his peace with Republican economics—tax breaks for the rich, a generally negative attitude to what Lady Bracknell called “social legislation,” and so on. He endorsed and voted for McCain. George W. Bush, too, if memory serves. As an undergraduate at McGill University in the late sixties, Charles was friends with Bob Rae, later the first New Democratic Party premier of Ontario—the NDP being the Canadian affiliate of the Socialist International. (Rae is now a leading Liberal Party parliamentarian, shadow foreign minister under Michael Ignatieff.) Charles used to tell me that if he still lived in Canada he’d vote NDP or Liberal and if there were no such thing as foreign policy he’d be a standard-issue liberal Democrat. I very much doubt whether he would still say that. In the column I quoted, he also writes:

Conservatives take a dim view of the regulation-bound, economically sclerotic, socially stagnant, nanny state that is the European Union. Nonetheless, Obama is ascendant and has the personal mandate to take the country where he wishes. He has laid out boldly the Brussels-bound path he wants to take.

This smells suspiciously like a red meat for the base. The slippery phrasing leaves open the question of whether Charles believes this to be an accurate description of countries like Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and France, as distinct from a description of the E.U. bureaucracy, which is unloved by all. Unlike the talk-radio conservatives, Charles has some idea of what social democracy actually is. What was notable about his column was not that he praised Obama’s speech or agreed with it but simply that, notwithstanding a few snarky twitches, he summarized it without undue distortion.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.

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